Demon Bound

that?”
    Dread tightened in Alice’s chest when she looked at the table, her open sketchbook. Khavi was already standing next to it, her eyes a deep black.
    Jake’s hand clasped hers. Ready, she knew, for any reaction. “A week ago, we found this beneath a burial chamber,” Alice said quietly. “The nephilim opened it. This is Zakril.”
    Alice didn’t protest when Khavi leaned forward, ripped out the page and vanished it. She didn’t flinch when the other woman placed her hand over Anaria’s face, and crushed the bone with a flex of her fingers.
    Behind her, Lyta tore into the nychipteran, shaking the ravaged corpse and swinging ribbons of crimson over the white floor, the walls.
    “Come,” Khavi said. “And tell me how it is that the nephilim are on Earth. I knew they would be, but not how or when it would happen.”
    Knew they would be . . . Alice’s steps slowed. Here, she realized, was the source of the prophecy. Dear heavens.
    Dimly, she heard Jake explain that the Gates to Hell had been closed, but that hundreds of demons were still left on Earth.
    Khavi nodded. “I see. Lucifer would not be able to go through the Gates. But the Rules must be enforced, and so he released the nephilim. Tell me, do they bring the demon back to Hell for Punishment, or do they slay him?”
    Death or Punishment—the two consequences a demon faced after killing a human or preventing free will. A Guardian was given the choice of Falling or Ascending.
    “They slay the demon,” Jake said. “It’s the nephilim’s only option. They can’t return to Hell.”
    An ironic smile twisted Khavi’s mouth. “No. Lucifer would not dare risk it, would he? Better that they pose a risk to Guardians and demons than to his throne.”
    “Yep. But enforcing the Rules isn’t all the nephilim are doing—” Jake crossed the threshold of the chamber and stopped. “Whoa damn. Alice?”
    She briefly met his eyes before letting her gaze search the chamber. She knew the glowing strands in their odd formations had surprised him, but she only gave them a cursory glance. In one of the upper corners, she found the familiar mind she’d sensed earlier: a cave weaver from Tunisia, weak—dying. The others lay upside-down on the bone floor, their thin legs curled, their bodies dry.
    “When I repair the concealment spell, the threads pull them in,” Khavi said. “They cannot bring the higher forms of life, but they do animals and insects.” She stopped in front of a waist-high black marble cylinder. Symbols had been carved into the surface; the luminescent silk strands were embedded in each symbol, so that they glowed with soft orange light. At the top of the cylinder, hundreds of rigid threads rose from a point to form an open, inverted cone. “The burial chamber must be this one. I knew it was one of these two,” she said, nodding toward another cylinder, “for they are the last Zakril made. I did not help construct either of them, but this is the one I most recently mended—and it is during that time you must have entered it and found his remains.”
    More cylinders were placed irregularly around the room. Each one, Alice realized, hid a temple. “And which did you mend before that?”
    Khavi pointed. “It is the one that held the statue of Zakril. These threads”—she gestured to the cone—“are the anchors. When we constructed the temples, we put the threads within the stone. Upon its completion, the ends of each thread were gathered together”—she made a fist, like a child holding balloons—“and teleported here. They stretch between the realms, and feed the spell from the cylinders to the temples.”
    “And the spell was supposed to hide you from Michael?” Jake sounded as if shock had a stranglehold on his throat, but Alice was amazed that he was even capable of speech. She wasn’t.
    “Yes, it does that—but it was humans who concerned Zakril and me. Except to Michael’s eyes, the concealment spell does not function when someone is alive within the temple. Yet when they were eventually abandoned, they might have stood for anyone to discover. And so the spell mimics the appearance of the sites before the temples were built, and the temples themselves are pulled into the in-between.”
    “The what?” Jake’s confusion echoed hers.
    “Into the reflection. In Caelum, in Hell, there is nothing of those realms that reflects—yet we see it, walk on it. It is the in-between.”
    No reflection . . . and no